Monday, December 28, 2009

I just read The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis by Mark Gluth, a novella, it felt aurally pleasant in a way of great refreshment, with mirror time worming and layers of photography and weaving of levels of consciousness and continuity, all in very brief, clean sentences; a beautiful package with one of the most memorable endings I've read in a while. Feels of classical short French writing but in modern American scenery, which I can't remember having happened in other books. A lot of people I will know will really like this.

I'm selling myself into reading from here on out, reading like happens in a bath, except I won't always be in the bath. I've read quite a lot in the days since Xmas. The sleep book is eating much of my air.

My dad's brain is going quickly.

I published an ebook on Lamination Colony: Georgic, With Eclogues for Interrogators by Mark Cunningham. It is different than most things that have been on the site. I have a huge triple-sized issue that is going up hopefully soon and then another ebook. Then I am not sure what I will do with the site.

I just remember this bit I published last year or something on Wigleaf is one of the only published parts of the novel that will come out from HP next year.

Life is kind of crunchy mix of weird and nice right now, my time has been mostly spent in mind throughout this season, and the season before. It was a nice year. It went fast and mostly in rooms. Next year is the same day.

Seeing an end at least now to insomnia book, MS word stops showing the word count at 100,000, which is good, because words

Sunday, December 20, 2009

It's been several months since my last speech re: Fugue State. I've been in a blank mode of my own, circling, recircling, in small rooms, reading texts within texts, thinking about sleep. In this time I've read this next text in the order, next to last, also the shortest, 'Traub in the City,' at least a dozen times. This weekend, I reread The Open Curtain, followed by The Wavering Knife, and then returned again to pick up at the second to last and smallest text inside this book, and found there in the shortest scrim the longest shouting. The book enveloping itself. This is not surprising in Evenson at all, considering his propensity for disclosing volumes within volumes (today 'Moran's Mexico' from The Wavering Knife about made me dizzy, with its room of teeth and tunnels in), and that even in seeing the small spacing of the two pages I knew something laid there ready to eat again in its eating, having learned what I've learned since last touching its face. These ideas could be called hyperbole in their intent, but this year for certain I've begun to feel that the certain thing I've tended toward in these last years can be felt only in such terms, or in the description around the center of the center, as I've gone on about here: that certain things have hyperbolic faces because the body on which they sit is made of something else. I won't continue in the circling of the circling of that meat body, but to say that herein, in the several months since returning to this two page spread, having read Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, and his Cinema 1, and with them begun searching for doors beside my doors, literally, this text, in two pages, owns a context for perhaps a whole body of work, an understanding, the groundwork on which Evenson's fictions sit gathering their power not even out of simple sound, as I've rattled on about in past months, but also in the borrowing of an other dark, of "several faces, coming one after another, quicker and quicker," all while underneath a very fine and sublime curtain, such as the curtains described in 'House Rules' from The Wavering Knife that, when lifted, show that the windows outside the house have been boarded down, allowing in only little stream of light where cracks make the space between the boards, hardly enough to illuminate any part of the whole house. As Traub here sees the bodies of a public metro all part of one vast and unnameable body, continually shifting and amorphous, he continues to try to draw the spaces, knowing he can not, knowing even in that vast amorphous massively spread face the air that makes the room around him does not touch any other object there inside it, does not touch him correctly, like all these texts in their becoming in this book here, in all the books, only a slightly further stretch to define that nowhere space, himself an oddly renamed image of a body already depicted in this very book, the mirror elongation of the slightly earlier 'Bauer in the Tyrol,' and yet he can not disturb that will to draw that space, confining and confined, elongated over several books within books, each ejecting and drawing into their black centers some massive fabric that will not be delineated or erased, will not lose its way in magic among these sentences and the rendition in their flood of something that is just above us and something in the stomach of this stomach in and of this house, a skin.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Friday, December 11, 2009

Tim Horvath writes an extremely generous and wonderful review of Scorch Atlas for Identity Theory, I mean the whole damn thing is worth excerpting, and wow: "Scorch Atlas is quite possibly the most visceral book I’ve ever read, and in its uncompromising slog through muck and murk, boot-heeled in language, the book carves out a style which, once experienced, feels necessary. As flickering lights can induce seizures, Butler’s prose seems prone toward causing synesthesia; touch permeates and choke-holds all the senses, rendering images tactile, reinventing sounds, smells and tastes, even air itself, as palpable spatio-temporal entities."

Going to Boston Saturday to lecture at Emerson on sentences, including sentences by a slew of people, D. Williams, Hannah, Goransson, Kilpatrick, Glaser, about 12 others, if you are in Boston maybe you can come or something, here's a flyer:

Fuck, Tyrant 7 is an ill ill motherfucker. I don't think I wrote my story that is in it, my mother's computer did. It's my best story. Still reading slow, haven't read anything that hasn't spinecrushed.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

“Ethics requires a subject bearing everything, subjected to everything, obedient with an obedience that precedes all understanding and all listening to the command. Therein lies a reversal of heteronomy into autonomy, and this is the way in which the Infinite comes to pass.” - Emmanuel Levinas

um oh i also have what they are referring to as 'fan fiction' in a fan fiction section in Opium 9, it is about Cliff Burton, it goes along with a piece by Matthew Simmons about Geezer Butler, there is some other magic in that boink

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Kristina Born's One Hour of Television is in the house. I've been shipping them in batches, so if it's not there yet, it will be shortly. They turned out as good as I had hoped:

You can still do an order for the preorder price for the next few days until I update it and add a dollar. So maybe consider it? Year of the Liquidator. I think it's a fine deal. The book makes me excited to think.

Also new is the inaugural issue of an online journal I've been stoked for since I heard about it, Gene Kwak's We Are Champion.

It's gots Higgs, Glaser, Svalina, Lutz, DiTrapano, Gould, Robinson, Papas, Annarummo, Harris, and I have two links bits that came from my attempt at appropriating Bernhard's The Voice Imitator.

Among those, really stoked that people will be able to read Rachel Glaser's Pee on Water online, as it is still one of my favorite stories ever.

And the DiTrapano comes from the first story in the first issue of No Colony, for which we are working hard on issue 3. It's gonna rip.

Another new online journal is Truth Sauce, who published this short thing I found I'd written on my hard drive and hidden in a series of nested folders, unless someone else wrote it and hid it there.

I like this proliferation of the online new.

Insomnia book is at 69269 words as of this minute. Today writing about dementia, Satanism, and Diane Arbus.

I have a 3,000 page book on my desk that I am reading a little.

The new Beach House album Teen Dream is the best album I've heard come out in a long while.